Yet if we are to fully understand the repetitive reporting on the U.S. presidential horse race, we need to look further and explicate the unspeakable.
Here again are James Douglass and Thomas Merton: " 'One of the awful facts of our age,' Merton wrote in 1965, 'is the evidence that [the world] is stricken indeed, stricken to the very core of its being by the presence of the Unspeakable.' The Vietnam War, the race to a global war, and the interlocking murders of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy were all signs of the Unspeakable. It remains deeply present in our world. As Merton warned, 'Those who are at present so eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be reconciled with it under this particular aspect: as the nest of the Unspeakable. This is what too few are willing to see.' "
That nest is our current resting place where we hatch our ongoing denials under the tutelage of the corporate media. It is the warfare state, the conjoined power of big business, media, intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, Wall Street, etc. It is the secret government spawned by the likes of Allen Dulles and his ilk whose rise and current power David Talbot meticulously chronicles in The Devil's Chessboard. It is the "deep state" that Peter Dale Scott dissects in The American Deep State where he explains how these secret dark forces have controlled or eliminated U.S. Presidents since their murder of JFK and how that assassination is linked to Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11 in a progressive growth of repressive secret power at the expense of democracy. It is Americans' refusal to come to terms with these events by not going beyond conventional political thinking and assuming such forces don't exist today. It is the protective stupidity of making believe that presidents and presidential candidates are unaware of the message sent from the streets of Dallas on November 22, 1963.
These are the issues that the corporate media -- and a lot of the alternative online media -- refuse to broach as they bombard us with non-stop news and commentary about the presidential primaries. Hilary, Bernie, Donald et al. -- the parade of first-name personalities who say this and pledge that, as if real power resided with them and they were our friends. If it sounds old, it is. We hear it every four years ad infinitum. It's the news that just repeats itself.
Maybe someday we'll get beyond our repetition compulsions and spotlight the unspeakable. If we don't, we are in for more of the same.
To repeat an endlessly repeated misquotation: "Play it again, Sam."
It's still the same old story.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
1
